A conversation with Sean Joyce, Irvine city manager and Spirit of Excellence recipient

How to raise a leader

I am the youngest of four boys, and when you're the youngest of four boys, it's probably natural to want to one day be the leader. I from a very young age always found the leadership role to be the role that I was very comfortable in and that I would seek in my career. I don't know that much else has been more influential nor as helpful to me as being the youngest of four boys. I am the sixth of seven children, so again I absolutely from a very early age aspired to be in a position of leadership.

She's 17 years old and a junior at Northwood High School. My wife and I have focused our attention on raising a whole person with a strong self confidence and strong core of values. Whether or not she chooses to be a leader or is appointed a leader, time will tell, and we'll leave that to her. We're really confident that she's well on her way to being a very complete person as she approaches adulthood.

Sitting inconspicuously at the edge of the dais at every City Council meeting is one of the most influential men in the city of Irvine – a man who has a coherent, well-articulated answer to any question the council asks.

At the helm of the city staff for almost nine years, City Manager Sean Joyce is the one who navigates the web of city government, motivating staffers to continue to offer services up to the Irvine standard – even through the economic recession.

That dedication has earned Joyce, a product of the Irvine Unified School District, this year’s Irvine Public Schools Foundation Spirit of Excellence Award in Leadership.

Joyce moved to Irvine with his family when the city incorporated in 1971 and graduated from Irvine High School in 1981. After city manager stints in Sierra Madre and South Pasadena, he returned to his hometown with his wife Veronica and daughter Madeline.

We asked Joyce what makes him the leader he is today.

Q.Congratulations on your award. How does it feel?

A. It was a thrill to hear the news. Having grown up here and living here for so long, it was a real honor. It is a real honor. I am one of seven kids; my parents moved us here in 1971, and to be able to work in my hometown to live here again is a thrill. My mother was able to join my wife and I that evening, and that made it particularly special.

Q.What made you want to come back to Irvine?

A. I literally from the day I started working in local government in 1987, I always wanted to get back to Irvine. In fact, I was living in Irvine when I started working for the city of Walnut in early 1987, so as I moved along in my career, it was always my goal to return to Irvine to live after I’d gotten married and moved out. I always wanted to be the city manager of my hometown. It’s one of the best city manager jobs in the country; more important for me it’s my hometown, my mother lives in town, and I have a brother and sister who live in town. When I became a parent, that goal was even more important, as my wife and I wanted to raise our daughter in Irvine. It was as much a personal goal as a professional one.

Q.How has your journey as city manager been?

A. I see the operations up close, and I’m even more impressed with the commitment that this organization has long held toward providing outstanding customer service to a deserving community, and it’s been a journey of learning and hopefully contributions as well along the way. I work here for a City Council that aspires to great things. The bar I set for myself every day is high, the bar that others set for me is very high, and I want to prove for myself every day and others for whom I work that I’m up for that challenge.

What I try to do everyday is to articulate high expectations, provide the resources necessary to meet those expectations and to instill core values in individuals who work here to achieve great things for our community every day. An approach I take to leading this organization is to help folks understand that we make an implicit promise to those who come to live, work and play in Irvine. And that implicit promise is that what they see every day around them is going to be just as beautiful just as sustainable tomorrow as it is today.

Q.What was your most important learning experience as a leader?

A. It was when I realized the importance of empathy in the role of a successful leader. I came to realize pretty early on that if I allowed myself to lead an organization with the assumption that everybody within that organization was just like me, I was going to make a lot of mistakes, and I was going to be an unsuccessful leader. The most important lesson I learned is that everybody is different, and it’s important to realize that so that I could treat people as individuals while leading them collectively.

Q.What is your proudest achievement as city manager?

A. The role that I played leading the organization through the recession. We were in the middle of the deepest recession of the last 75 years or so. I’m proud in leading the organization through the realization of the city council’s vision that we preserve all essential services throughout the recession without an adverse impact to our residents and others we serve, while also bolstering services where they were so desperately needed during those difficult times.

Q.What goals do you have left to achieve?

A. I have a lot of goals left to achieve that would include adding to our inventory of park and public facilities, advancing the next phases of construction of the Orange County Great Park, enhancing our already outstanding public safety services, developing a financial strategy for the deployment of resources that we expect to receive from the Orange County Fire Authority and bolstering our financial reserves for when they may be needed in the future to again preserve municipal services when the next recession occurs.

Q.You have a very articulate and intentional way of speaking. How did you develop that skill?

A. I read a lot, and my mother insisted on good grammar at home as we were all growing up. I think the reading, the curriculum of a political science student and public policy student probably had something to do with my vocabulary and my own speaking style. And I’m trying to make my parents proud every day.

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